View From the Legislature

Next week students in Manitoba will be heading back to classes at schools around the province. For parents, that means both a new routine as well as preparations to ensure their children are ready to begin a new year of learning.

A new school year also means getting to know new teachers and school administrators. For most parents and certainly for students, those are the people who they are in the closest contact with throughout the school year. While school trustees are busy monitoring budgets and ensuring proper governance, their work isn’t as visible to parents on a day-to-day basis.

Over many decades and in different provinces, there has often been debate about the role of school trustees. Usually there is agreement that a system that provides strong governance, local accountability and local autonomy has value. Achieving that hasn’t always been as easy. The most recent example comes from Manitoba’s NDP government. Over 8 years in Opposition, the NDP would often demand that school divisions be allowed to exercise their own individual autonomy. They were quick to decry any perceived interference with local decision making. Yet, since assuming government about 10 months ago, the NDP have repeatedly interfered with local school boards when those school boards seemed to be acting in a manner in which the NDP on Broadway disagreed with.

In less than a year, the NDP have ordered a governance review of a western Manitoba school division, subsequently installing a three-person oversight panel that reports to the Minister of Education. It also ordered a financial review of the Seine River School Division earlier this year. And, just last week, the NDP Minister of Education appointed a former Winnipeg school administrator as a “special advisor” to the Hanover School Division Board of Trustees. That individual will also report directly to the Minister of Education. The last move came after an anonymous group asked the Minister of Education to remove the majority of democratically elected trustees of the Hanover School Division.

If the nature of the interventions doesn’t appear to be unusual to observers, then the number of interventions in such a short period of time should. Some of the reasons for the unprecedented level of interference are known and understood but others are less certain. One clear connection is that each seems to be sparked, not because of a breach in legislation or policy, but because of local actions that the NDP disagree with.

Which raises the question of what exactly the NDP, when they were in opposition, meant by respecting local decision making of school boards? At the time, it was framed as trusting local decisions of locally elected officials. But that seems to have changed since coming into government. Today it appears that the definition of local independence the NDP have applied to school boards is, as long as school boards operate the way the NDP wants them to, they have independence. If they act any other way, the NDP will interfere with them.

In the same month that the NDP Education Minister was reporting that homeschooling numbers in the province are increasing dramatically (along with increasing enrolment in independent schools), the NDP have made it clear that their idea of school board autonomy has changed quite dramatically in just a few months. It’s another reminder that what the NDP say, isn’t exactly the way they govern.